Maybe you've heard our new sister podcast about culture, Pop Rocket. It’s hosted by a comic called Guy Branum. His new stand up album Effable was just released, so we thought this’d be a good opportunity to play you some of his set from last year’s Atlantic Ocean Comedy and Music Festival, AKA Boat Party dot Biz. So here’s the great Guy Branum, recorded live on a ship in the Caribbean.

It's time for Canonball. We take a leap into the deep end and talk to experts about classic albums -- or albums that should be considered classics -- and find out what makes them great.

This week, we’re joined by music historian and journalist Peter Guralnick. He's written about rock, soul and blues musicians for decades, profiling Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Sam Cooke, and Elvis among dozens of others.

But for our segment, he chose a record that captures what he loves about live music. It was recorded by the ethnomusicologist Harry Oster in the late 50s and early 60s, and it was released on as Country Negro Jam Sessions. (Please excuse the anachronistic title).

Several of Peter's books, including his acclaimed biography of Elvis, are now reissued with video and audio in e-book format. You can find more at PeterGuralnick.com.

For most of the past fifteen years, Tom Scharpling has hosted a free-form comedy show called The Best Show. It began on the New Jersey community radio station WFMU, and it grew into its own universe. That universe includes regular calls in character from Scharpling's comedy partner Jon Wurster, and a thriving community of listeners and callers.

A few years ago, the show moved from its home on the radio to a new home on the internet, where it still streams each Tuesday evening night and podcasts every week.

Tom Scharpling joined us to talk about his on-air personality, his community of listeners, and the creation of The Best Show's aesthetic.

Sara Schaefer is a comedian, writer and performer who's appeared on @Midnight, Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, Best Week Ever, and Inside Amy Schumer. You may have also seen her work with her comedy partner Nikki Glaser on MTV's Nikki and Sara Live.

On her new stand up album, she shared a memory of her treasured middle school years.

By the time The Police released "Roxanne", their first single from their debut album in 1978, guitarist Andy Summers had gone through several phases of his career. By sixteen, he was playing in local clubs and in short order he was playing with the London-based R&B group, Zoot Money's Big Roll Band. That group evolved into a psychedelic rock band in the late 1960s. Summers played a brief American tour with The Soft Machine, then rejoined Zoot Money to play with a new incarnation of The Animals before finally taking a break.

He studied classical guitar for a few years in Los Angeles, and by the time he formed The Police with Sting and Stewart Copeland in 1977, he had playing music professionally for over fifteen years.

The musician, producer and 73-year-old mastermind of Parliament-Funkadelic, George Clinton, has never been shy of the limelight. He started his career singing doo wop, later found himself writing songs for Motown, and finally wound up creating a wholly unique sound and visual experience with Parliament-Funkadelic. They made hits like One Nation Under A Groove and Flashlight and their performances were as funky as their tunes.

In recent years, Clinton has found himself entangled in a series of legal battles over the copyrights of his songs. While fighting in the courts, George found himself fighting for his health as well. The doctor of the Funk gave himself his own prognosis: if he was going to continue a musical career and regain agency in his business affairs, he had to clean up his act, and he has.

The pioneer of funk joins us this week to talk about the evolution of his musical career, getting wild onstage, and putting forward momentum back into his musical career -- and even gives us an update on Sly Stone.

You know those tags you see on walls, park benches and trash cans everywhere? You might not think it's something beautiful, but Christian Acker does. His book Flip the Script is a look at graffiti typography, and celebrates the art of tagging -- one of the last strongholds of highly refined penmanship.

Acker collected writing and spoke to graffiti artists all over the country, to chronicle and analyze hand styles from Oakland to Queens. In a world where people too rarely place ink to paper, we'll look at a typographical expression that reflects your individuality, roots, and even how long you've been practicing.

It's MaxFunDrive time! The production of Bullseye is funded by your donations. Become a monthly sustaining member now, and get cool thank you-gifts, plus unlock challenge funds from other donors and help us meet our goal of 4000 new and upgrading members by March 27th. Just visit www.maximumfun.org/donate!

Lynda Barry is a self-identified "freak", a cartoonist, a writer, and for the last couple of years, she's also been a college professor teaching interdisciplinary creativity at the University of Wisconsin.

What does that mean? Well, she encourages students to abandon their fears of creating and embrace their work and process.

Tom Arnold is a real show business survivor. In the mid 1990s he got famous -- both the kind you want to be, and the kind you don't want to be. His first big job in Hollywood was as a writer on Roseanne. He ended up married to her. He became a regular on the show and their relationship was tabloid fodder for five years. By the time they broke up in 1994, you couldn't make it through a late night monologue without a Tom Arnold joke.

But that was just the beginning of Tom Arnold's ride. A star making performance in a huge hit movie, True Lies, made him a star. Then a disastrous series of broad comedies made his career a punchline again.

But Arnold never stopped working, as a character actor, as a sports talk show host, as a stand up comic, and now in his 50s he's a dad for the first time and he's now been a star in Hollywood for thirty years. His new show is Yahoo's Sin City Saints. Arnold also continues to perform stand up across the country.

Tom talks with us about growing up in Iowa and fighting bullies, the difficulties of working in Las Vegas, his enduring respect for Roseanne, and the way he's found satisfaction with his work.

Before he was the world's most famous drag queen, RuPaul was just a kid growing up in San Diego, California. But he knew something was different about him. He noticed things that other people didn't. He found joy in the irreverence of characters like Bugs Bunny, and TV shows like Monty Python's Flying Circus. When he was still in his teens, he packed his bags and followed his sister to Atlanta. He attended performing arts high school, and a brief stint as a car salesman, he started performing with a couple of underground bands. They were searching for a way to be subversive, and decided to perform in drag. RuPaul found that something clicked -- both for himself, and for the audience.

He spent years performing and appearing on public access TV, but he became an international star with his 1992 hit single, "Supermodel".

Recently, he's hosted RuPaul's Drag Race, a reality competition series featuring RuPaul as host and mentor to the contestants as they battle to become America's next drag superstar. Drag Race is now in its seventh season on LOGO TV.

Her first recommendation is a memoir about a TV repairman's obsession with immortality that leads to his professional pursuit of cryonics -- the art of freezing people. It's called Freezing People Is (Not) Easy: My Adventures in Cryonics by Bob Nelson, Kenneth Bly and Sally Magana.

Her second recommendation is a twining novel about the legendary gangster Meyer Lansky and a murder investigation in Israel, called Jacket Copy.

The hosts of the podcast My Brother, My Brother and Me won't hesitate to give their advice, though they don't always suggest you follow it.

Justin McElroy, Travis McElroy and Griffin McElroy stop by Bullseye to answer some of our listeners' cultural quandaries. Here are their takes on dealing with your parents' (terrible) TV recommendations, what it means to hog a game at a barcade, and how comedians should respond to hecklers in the crowd.

Terry Crews has taken a pretty unconventional path. He played football in college, but he didn't go on scholarship, and joined the team as a walk on. He played in the NFL for years as a linebacker with the Rams and the Chargers, but when he was done, he didn't become a sports commentator.

Instead, Crews went back to one of his first loves -- the arts. And while he continues his devotion to his workout regimen, he now uses his physicality in his work as an actor. He's worked steadily in a string of movies like The Longest Yard and The Expendables, and adds a tough-but-caring element to his characters in TV shows like Everybody Hates Chris and Brooklyn Nine-Nine.

You can see him now as an essential part of Brooklyn Nine-Nine's ensemble as the police detective and family man, Sergeant Terry Jeffords.

This week, Crews tells us about growing up in Flint, Michigan, discovering his love of both art and physical fitness, the difficulty of ending an NFL career, and the joys of working on Brooklyn Nine-Nine.

Nick Hornby became famous as a literary writer for men. His first three books were about guys, fans specifically, Fever Pitch was a memoir about Hornby’s love of soccer; High Fidelity was about a record store owner, struggling with love. About A Boy was about a sort of boyish man tending to a mannish boy.

Hornby has since written several other books and screenplays, including Oscar nominee An Education.

His new novel, Funny Girl, is about a working class young woman in the 1960s who leaves her small town in search of a career on television, and her success on a BBC sitcom.

He sat down with Jesse to talk about why he set his novel in the mid-60s (and why its protagonist is a woman), personal ambition and creativity, and what it's like to be a Hollywood dinner guest.

Luis Guzmán is a veteran character actor. But back in the early 1990s, he was still working as a social worker on the Lower East Side, and acting was more of a side gig. Then he got a role that put him on the map -- the thuggish sidekick Pachanga in the 1993 movie Carlito's Way.

As Guzmán tells it, everything crystallized with that role.

You can see Luis Guzmán playing evil lawyer Licenciado Schmidt in the new movie Ana Maria in Novela Land, in theaters now.

Jesse sits down with acclaimed filmmaker Spike Lee. Spike tells us about how addiction is made explicit in his new movie, Da Sweet Blood of Jesus, how he really feels about Larry Bird and about his own very serious addiction.... to Air Jordans.

Jesse sits down with Katja Blichfeld and Ben Sinclair. Katja Blichfeld is a casting director who previously won an Emmy for her work on 30 Rock; Ben Sinclair is an actor. The two are a married couple, and created the series High Maintenance, a “not on television” show that follows a New York City marijuana delivery guy as he visits his various clients.

The series has evolved over two seasons and several years of production. Sinclair and Blichfeld released the second half of season 2 on Vimeo earlier this month.

If you liked this, let someone know! Click here to share this interview with someone.

Dan Gilroy is the writer and director of the movie Nightcrawler, which is nominated for an Academy Award for Best Screenplay. The movie stars Jake Gyllenhaal as Lou Bloom, a video stringer for a local TV news program, and Dan's wife Rene Russo as an overnight news producer, Nina.

Lou is an anti-hero, bordering on a psychopath. His attempts to build a career and establish relationships with others are charmingly off-kilter. But also more than a little creepy. Russo’s character, Nina, ends up on the receiving end of both the charm and the creepiness.

Jesse spoke with Gilroy and Russo in front of a live audience at a benefit for the film nonprofit Vidiots.

Alexandre Desplat is an Academy-Award-nominated French film composer. He's written the score for lots of Hollywood movies: Zero Dark Thirty, Harry Potter, Fantastic Mr. Fox, and several Harry Potter films among others.

The Imitation Game stars Benedict Cumberbatch as the English mathematician Alan Turing. Turing helped crack the Enigma code during World War II, but his achievements didn't keep him from being persecuted for his sexuality.

Desplate broke down the orchestration in the main theme from the film.

You can listen to other episodes of Song Exploder on our website, in iTunes or wherever you download podcasts.

Chris Rock has never strayed for too long from stand up comedy. He started performing stand up in his late teens, then he was handpicked by Eddie Murphy to be in Beverly Hills Cop II. Rock then spent a few years on Saturday Night Live and In Living Color, and eventually turned to stand up yet again in the mid 1990s.

You probably remember what happened next. Rock released a series of stand up specials, earning him several Emmys and cementing his status as one of the industry's best comics.

It was Spike Lee's Do The Right Thing that inspired him to work behind the camera, as a movie director. Rock directed two movies in the 2000s, Head of State and I Think I Love My Wife. His latest is a comedy called Top Five. Rock stars as Andre Allen, a famous comic who wants to be taken seriously as an actor. Andre can't get audiences to embrace his dramatic turn in a movie about the Haitian slave rebellion -- they just want him to be funny.

Rock will talk about why he's making movies instead of touring stand up clubs, why he isn't worried about becoming "old Bob Hope", and the real reason he's afraid of losing his fame.

John Cleese is one of the most influential figures of comedy. He's best known as one the creative forces behind the legendary comedy troupe Monty Python. But before that, he was almost a lawyer.

Cleese went to Cambridge, studied law, and was about to accept a job with a big firm when another opportunity came up. This one was perhaps slightly less distinguished, but infinitely more appealing to Cleese. The BBC was impressed by his work with his college comedy revue, The Footlights, and offered him a job writing and producing comedy.

In his new memoir So, Anyway… Cleese discusses his journey, from his childhood in prep school, to his early days of sketch comedy at Cambridge, to the co-founding of the Pythons.

Cleese will talk about being one of the "scientific" minds of the Pythons, writing and re-writing with his comedy partner Graham Chapman, and how he felt about the recent Monty Python reunion.

This week's episode was recorded live on stage in the Masonic Lodge at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery. Our thanks to them for hosting us. Additional thanks to NPR's Generation Listen for sponsoring the event.

Dan Harmon created the NBC sitcom Community. It’s a show about seven misfits at a community college trying to get their lives together as they deal with their new friendships. The show’s offbeat humor and characters earned it a devoted following and helped Harmon rise to fame.
Harmon was fired from Community after its third season, but it wasn’t long before he was able to find a new job… as the showrunner for Community.

In the year that Community went on without him, he took his podcast on the road. Documentarian Neil Berkley produced a movie about the tour and Harmon’s impact on others. It’s called Harmontown.

Harmon will talk about his mindset going into the sixth season of Community, what he likes and dislikes about traditional sitcoms and why he will never again share a personal voicemail from Chevy Chase with a public audience.

You can catch the documentary Harmontown in select theaters and available on demand now.

Rob Corddry has been a correspondent for The Daily Showand starred in a bunch of different movies, but more recently his face -- covered in clown make-up -- has been a fixture of Los Angeles billboards and bus stops. It’s because he created and stars in adult swim’s Children’s Hospital. It’s probably the silliest show to have ever won an Emmy.

Corddry also plays a doctor in the webseries Wedlock. In it, he attempts to help a couple played by Mark Duplass and Jennifer Lafleur who are desperate to start a romantic relationship, but have none of the chemistry necessary to make it happen.

Corddry will talk about growing up as the oldest sibling, what he worked out in therapy, and what it’s like being on-set with Michael Bay.

Andy Kindler was the second comedian that joined us live on stage in the Masonic Lodge at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery. He’s had two specials on Comedy Central and has an annual State of the Industry Address at Montreal’s Just For Laughs, festival.

You can catch Kindler as the voice of Mort in the animated series Bob’s Burgers and as a fictionalized version of himself in the IFC series Maron.

Singer and fiddler Sara Watkins has been busy in the bluegrass scene since she founded Nickel Creek with her brother Sean and mandolinist Chris Thile in 1989. She's released five studio albums as part of the band. In 2009, she began her own solo project and has released two albums.

Watkins joined us to perform the single "You and Me" from her 2012 album Sun Midnight Sun. Her band included Sean Watkins on guitar, Don Heffington on drums and Benmont Tench on piano.
Sara and Sean have a monthly podcast called Watkins Family Hour in which they banter and play music with fellow bluegrass musicians. You can download it on iTunes.